Last night, Donald Trump took on the mantle of the Republican candidate for rebranding as president of the United States, breaking a Hatch Act law that says politics shall not be played out on public (White House) spaces. Fire works went off. Political commentators looked exhausted tying to keep up with Trump's prevarications and immoralities.
In the South, Hurricane Laura lashed the coasts and inland waterways of Louisiana with wind gusts up to 175 mph last night and today while in the West, forest fires raged and crackled. All of this snuggled down in a backdrop of Corona-19 epidemic that has claimed 180K+- American lives.
In my town, a place of pinch-pottery and other bling, shops and stores dribble into oblivion. Those with expensive rental space on Main Street ... well ... my sympathies are muted. The nearby University of Massachusetts at Amherst announces furloughs. Colleges everywhere are losing traction (read, "money").
On the sports front, at least once professional basketball team -- the Milwaukee Bucks (whose faces are largely brown and black) -- declined to take part in a playoff game in the wake of an as-yet-not-detailed shooting of a black man in Kenosha, Wisc. ... seven police-officer shots in the back at point-blank range while the black man's (Jacob Blake) three children sat in a car into which he was leaning. There has been violence as anyone might imagine ... seven (or more) shots in the back upcloseandpersonal and JEEEEE-SUS!
When I awoke this morning, I thought, now that Trump is finally a candidate and currently shows waning strength, it is time to know where the guns are. Even among cowardly Republicans, it is a little early for Trump's Mossolini fascism, but I hoped my younger son knew where his pistols were. (Turns out he has a small-bore shotgun as well.) The last time the well-to-do fended off the great unawashed -- and those with the tax breaks circled the wagons -- the cops and the military had most of the weapons. (Picture comes from England, but the substance is pretty much the same.)
Law and order, but whose law and whose order?